US Patent 10326830 Multipath tunneling to a service offered at several datacenters

Techniques are disclosed herein regarding interfaces and multipath groups each associated with some of the interfaces to a datacenter. The techniques can include forwarding a network packet to be processed by a service, the service offered on each datacenter such that the network packet can be processed interchangeably at each datacenter. The techniques can also include, selecting one of the multipath groups for outputting of the network packet to the datacenter corresponding to the selected multipath group for processing by the service, the selecting based upon a cost to process the network packet at a respective one of the datacenters corresponding to each of the multipath groups. The techniques can further include, upon determining that the selected multipath group corresponds to a datacenter with an intervening second domain between the device and the corresponding datacenter, encapsulating the network packet for tunneling the network packet through the second domain.